Poetry. The book's poems detail rewards, challenges, and disappointments of life, especially in Missouri and the Midwest, as well as meditations on Midwestern nature and geography and on the ironies of the poet's place in contemporary culture. "The title says it all," says Bargen when asked sum up his newest book, "the ways that we fail ourselves, each other, sustaining ourselves on the earth, are there for all of us to see / read, if we will just open our eyes and minds. I hope the panes of these poems are clear enough for all to see through."

"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.

From the Inside Flap:

In Trouble Behind Glass Doors, Walter Bargen offers up— by way of those moments that adhere to us forever, those “trumpet vines / [that] once brushed the backs of our necks / at the zenith of a creaking arc”—a sympathetic voice to honor the land he lives on and the lives who seek its often difficult heart. Because “We never leave the places / we've lived. We construct and reconstruct our absences.” To this end, the poet has created a strong, lyrical, sometimes humorous testament that heeds a world we can very much, and gratefully, see.--Gary Gildner Whether turning his attention to the poet as unlikely, small-town-parade Grand Marshall, a relationship that's reached the point-of-no-return that pilots know (“fuel / too low to turn back and too low to arrive”), fedoratossing grandfathers who cheat at Go Fish, or American foreign policy as enacted by Laurel and Hardy, Walter Bargen reminds us—in language at once plain-spoken and oddly elegant— that we walk through a world fraught with equal measures of danger, wonder, and cockeyed joy.--David Clewell

About the Author:

Walter Bargen has published sixteen books of poetry and one chapbook. His poems and fictions have appeared in over one hundred magazines, including New Letters, River Styx, and A capella Zoo. He has won the William Rockhill Nelson Award, the Chester H. Jones Foundation Prize, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. In 2008, he was appointed to be the first poet laureate of Missouri. He lives in Ashland, Missouri, with his wife, Bobette, and twenty-some cats.